Monday, July 30, 2012

In the long run, one of the most influential books of the 20th century may turn out to
be Joseph Campbell’s THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES.

The book and the ideas in it are having a major impact on writing and story-telling, but
above all on movie-making. Filmmakers like John Boorman, George Miller, Steven
Spielberg, George Lucas, and Francis Coppola owe their successes in part to the ageless
patterns that Joseph Campbell identifies in the book. The ideas Campbell presents in this
and other books are an excellent set of analytical tools. With them you can almost always
determine what’s wrong with a story that’s floundering; and you can find a better solution
almost any story problem by examining the pattern laid out in the book.

Friday, July 27, 2012

All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through
the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book
before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the
previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your
clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.

These dreamings by swallowing smiles (deviant art) encompass themes of loneliness,
compassion, burden, mourning, wonder, magic, and fancy through color combinations,
switches in proportion, and the addition of little things like a crown, tears, a horn, and
insides. Each is an amazing tale in the great and ever-growing world of stories.

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Chandresh’s
guests remain there until just before dawn, and when they do finally depart there are three times the number of diagrams and plans and notes than there had
been when they arrived, strewn and pinned around the study like maps to an unknown treasure.

- Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

If you haven't read it, it's wondrous, so you should.
And take a look at some great fan art below:

Beauty, the world seemed to say. And as if to prove it (scientifically) wherever he looked
at the houses, at the railings, at the antelopes stretching over the palings, beauty sprang
instantly. To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy. Up in the sky
swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round and round, yet always
with perfect control as if elastics held them; and the flies rising and falling; and the sun
spotting now this leaf, now that, in mockery, dazzling it with soft gold in pure good temper;
and now again some chime (it might be a motor horn) tinkling divinely on the grass stalks
—all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the
truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere.

A tightrope walker. I recently saw one while visiting Niagara Falls - an act tinted with magic.
The man who recently crossed the falls on tightrope got his start with the Flying Wallendas,
a group of circus performers spanning seven generations. What an interesting back story.
Think of all the other characters found at a circus - bearded lady, the ones that lay on beds of
nails, the contortionists, lion tamers, illusionists. What about some obscure ones, new ones
from our own imaginations? What are their histories and futures? What might they dare to do?

As Ray Bradbury says in Zen in the Art of Writing, Characters would do my work for me,
if I let them alone, if I gave them their heads, which is to say, their fantasies, their frights.

AND

Find a character, like yourself, who will want something or not want something, with
all his heart. Give him running orders. Shoot him off. Then follow as fast as you can go.
The character, in his great love or hate, will rush you through to the end of the story.

Flirtation and love can be cast in thousands of ways, each one catching the reader
in the love story as well. First a glance, then a word, a laugh, a touch.
Here are bits of inspiration for writing these things.